Scam artists targeting people in Franklin County

One of the scams involves someone claiming you're a winner of a multi-million dollar lottery and a car.

FRANKLIN COUNTY,Va. -

Scam artists are targeting people in Franklin County. The sheriff's office has been receiving calls about two scams. The sheriff’s office has no reported victims presently.

One of the scams involves someone calling a victim claiming they’re a winner of a multi-million dollar lottery and a car.The scammers tell the person over the phone that they need to purchase a Green Dot card, which is a prepaid credit card. The scammers claim they need the card numbers for some type of verification, but this is when they access whatever money is put on the card by the victim.

Scam artist are also using another scam. They call the victims house late at night posing as a relative in trouble, needing money.The hope is to confuse the victim at a late hour causing them to give their credit card information over the phone.

“The difficulty with the majority of these types of scams is that the originating call is not coming from Virginia. It’s either coming from the west coast, from out of the country; we've seen a number of them from Jamaica and it is next to impossible to try and prosecute these types of crimes,” said Captain Mark Torbert.

If you receive one of these calls hang up and call the sheriff's office.

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